A brief explanation of the different type of games out there, in terms of type of gameplay – some of course will be a mixture of two or more aspects of play!
Board games – as they sound, games based on a board, usually with playing pieces moving around terrain or a track. From as simple as Ludo to complicated wargames like A World at War – a game so big it has specific named counters for each and every capital ship in world war two (I’ve got a copy and had to build a special board for the (paper) map as I didn’t have a table big enough).
Many, many board games really are just variants of either Ludo or Snakes and Ladders (especially the shit TV tie in games that appear every Christmas) but there are multitude of different board games out there, as described in the posts above and there has been a revolution in terms of quality over the last decade or so. This seems to have been at least partly led by the really good games design coming out of German games companies.
Play can include laying pieces on the board like the train counters in Ticket to Ride, attacking other players (Risk, Britannia and loads more) or even removing pieces such as the disease counters in Pandemic.
Examples: Ticket to Ride (various versions available but the European map one is strongly recommended), Small World, Civilisation, Britannia and many, many others.
Tile laying games – as it sounds, a game which usually doesn’t have a map or board, instead players take turns to lay terrain/map tiles as part of their turn. This results in much more varied play as the map is rarely the same twice. Play usually also involves card play of some sort, although not always. A lot of the very good games of recent years have been tile laying games.
Examples: Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan, Forbidden Island and Zombies
Co-operative games – games in which players are working together to reach a common goal and are effectively playing against the game. This can be a board game like Pandemic, played on a map of the world or a tile laying game like Forbidden Island where players are trying to rescue four treasures before the island sinks into the sea.
Some co-operative games have the possibility that one player will turn out to be working against the team, as in Shadows over Camelot where players are Knights of the Round Table trying to prevent Camelot falling, but one may be a traitor. It has little model catapults and wins because of this alone.
Examples: Pandemic, Shadows over Camelot, Forbidden Island.
Card games – there are lots of different types of these too:
Trading card games such as Bohnanza where players gain points by collecting suits in the form of different types of beans and can trade cards with each other.
Deck building games such as Dominion where players are building up a collection of cards which allows them to reach objectives, perform tasks and attack or defend from other players. Some are stand alone card games and some are combined in play with a board game.
Happy Families type games where people are either collecting or getting rid of cards. A personal favourite is Family Business where players start with a ‘family’ of historical mobsters and seek to wipe out the gangsters of all the other players, using different event and action cards.
Story telling – some games involve card collecting that effectively build up a story.
There are probably loads of other different takes on card games I haven’t thought of but that’s a good start.
